The additional guidelines for the new award, which will open for submissions in March, mirror those of its other National Book Award peers, — the work needs to be either newly on the market or as yet unreleased — with one clear distinction: both author and translator must be living at the time of submission, but neither needs to be a U.S. citizen. For every other honor that the National Book Foundation awards, authors must be legally "American." In an unprecedented move, the board, which unanimously voted to create a prize for Translated Work, has acknowledged both that English is not an exclusively "American" language, and that a person's citizenship is arbitrary in the face of artistic influence.